Original Title: The Great TPS Lie: Crypto's Obsession With Solving Problems Nobody Has
Original Author: @therosieum, @tenprotocol member
Original Translation: Rhythm Little Deep
Editor's Note: The article criticizes the crypto industry's blind pursuit of high TPS (transactions per second), arguing that this competition is false advertising that overlooks real user needs. Project teams exaggerate lab data to attract funding and attention, often sacrificing decentralization, security, and practicality, solving problems that no one cares about. The author calls for a focus on truly meaningful blockchain applications, building according to the scale of actual use cases rather than chasing flashy numbers.
The following is the original content (reorganized for readability):
Every week, a new L1 or L2 project launches, claiming, "We can handle 100,000 transactions per second!"
Sometimes it's 50,000, sometimes it's 1,000,000.
The specific numbers don't matter because they are almost all nonsense.
The "Speed Competition" of Transaction Speed
The scalability war has become the most embarrassing contest in the crypto world. Every new protocol must claim to have a higher TPS than the previous one, regardless of whether these speeds are:
Actually achievable outside their AWS test nets (spoiler: basically impossible)
Meaningful for real-world applications
Necessary for actual human use cases
This obsession with throughput is simply a version of the crypto world taking a joyride in a Lamborghini during peak hours. The problem lies not in the specifications, but in the context.
Let's Talk About Real Data
Visa, the payment giant that processes transactions for billions of people worldwide, averages about 1,700 transactions per second. Their theoretical maximum is around 24,000 TPS, but they have never needed that capacity in decades of operation.
Meanwhile, most blockchain projects struggle to attract even 100 daily active users.
If your Discord emojis outnumber your on-chain transactions, you might be solving an imaginary problem.
The Hidden Costs of Pursuing "Mega" Scalability
An obsession with theoretical throughput can lead to real issues that harm users.
First, there's disguised centralization: in the pursuit of high TPS, decentralization is often sacrificed just for a marketing number.
Second, there's security performance: cutting corners in a rush to scale, laying down vulnerabilities that will eventually be exploited.
Third, there's talent drain: top talent is not building what users truly need but is stuck optimizing synthetic benchmarks.
Finally, there's blatant deception: the lab numbers touted by networks crumble under real-world conditions.
The Disturbing Truth
The obsession with extreme scalability has two reasons:
You need to sound like you have impressive technology to justify your $100 million funding
You desperately want your chain to stand out in a market of over 5,000 blockchains
User needs are merely an afterthought. The real game is to convince retail investors that you are the ultimate solution—VCs serve as the loudest KOLs in your TPS narrative.
Building Something Truly Meaningful
If you are genuinely building something in this field, let me give you a wake-up call:
Focus on doing things that only blockchain can achieve
Design an economic model that doesn't require constantly bringing in new users
Create an interface that doesn't make ordinary people want to smash their computers
Build according to the scale of actual use cases, not just to make your pitch deck look good
Reality Check on Scalability
Next time a project boasts it can handle 500,000 TPS, ask them: "What are these transactions actually doing? Who is generating them? For what purpose?"
When they stammer about "future adoption" and "web3 social," you'll know the answer.
True innovation is not theoretical performance in a vacuum, but building what people genuinely need, scaling appropriately according to demand.
Everything else is just an expensive performance art disguised as technology.
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